RONAN
Pure masochism brought me to the potluck dance party.
Masochism, and Katch. I’d been way up Columbia Street when I saw him in the distance. Tiny in the twilight that smelled like the sea, even though we were a hundred miles upriver from it. Beautiful—proud posture, inked arms, clove smoke clouding the air behind him—but stunted somehow, like the weight of Hudson threatened to break him.
Sunset had made the sky spectacular, deep dark blue in contrast to the amber cast the streetlights gave the city. The Catskill Mountains were black in the distance. Clouds shaped like whales drifted high overhead. My breath caught, the scene was so lovely. Something throbbed through me. A feeling, for this place. This city. This fucking city. Something a lot like love.
How the fuck is that possible?
I took out my camera.
But when I looked through my lens? They weren’t clouds that looked like whales. They were whales. Blue whales and black sperm whales, big as zeppelins, swimming through the sky in hyper-slow motion.
Good news, Ronan! You’re going crazy!
Bile flooded my mouth. I stopped and spat it into the street; tried to shake off the shivers.
According to the internet—where I’d spent entirely too much time that morning—the most dangerous symptoms associated with methamphetamine withdrawal are severe depression and the potential to develop psychosis.
A laugh or a shriek tried to climb my throat, but I bit it back. I had the strangest feeling that if I laughed out loud I’d break every window on Warren Street.
I followed Katch down, too far away to call his name without sounding like a crazy person—but when he turned into the Penelope’s Quilt warehouse I figured I’d have ample time to corner him in there.
And say what? What are you doing in my hometown? Did you show up for the photo shoot I had you scheduled for yesterday? And did you have anything to do with my ending up here? Did you smoke some cigarettes on my father’s porch?
Anyway, the vast place was so packed I couldn’t find him, with the lights down low and the music up high, and strobes and screens turning every person’s face into a dozen different faces. So while I waited for him to emerge from the crowd, I indulged in masochism. The pain of looking at these laughing hipsters. Maggots consuming the corpse of my town. Filthy hyenas savaging the body of a magnificent elephant. Pretty much all I’d been doing, in the days since my arrival. Reveling in agony; hiding from my broken father.
Jark Trowse smiled down at us from a dozen giant campaign posters. Lilly stood beneath him, rhinestone glasses and all, handing out buttons and big sincere smiles.
I didn’t venture far from the door. Katch might slip out once he’d had something to eat—and anyway I wanted an easy escape route myself, for the inevitable moment where I gripped the knife blade of my own hatred a little too hard and started bleeding. I wasn’t standing there very long, but I was able to snag and drain champagne flutes off the trays of three separate waiters.
Cold wind caressed my face, but I didn’t look at the opened door right away.
“Ronan,” Dom said, startling me, and I turned to take him in. In uniform, gun at his hip, he looked like the latest avatar of some magnificent warrior god.
“Dom,” I said, throat dry, struggling to clear my head of how the sight of him still hit me. So tall, so clean-shaven. “Don’t tell me you’re part of this scene.”
“You blend in better than me,” he said, but then grinned.
Attalah had texted me earlier in the day, and I’d meant to write her back. Now I felt guilty for ignoring her message, on top of my guilt for feeling such lust for her husband.
Thirty seconds of silence later, Dom asked, “Wanna get the fuck out of here?”
“Hell yeah, I do,” I said. “But we didn’t eat anything. Allegedly they spend a ton of money—”
“Don’t you read? If you eat the food of the underworld, you’re condemned to stay there.”
“Of course,” I said. “How silly of me to forget that.”
Once we got outside I leaned against him as we walked. He let me.
“Those fucking assholes,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “You eat anything today?”
“Why?”
“Because you sound like maybe you’re a little drunk.”
“I’m fine,” I said. “I had a lot of coffee, which is a stimulant, and a lot of alcohol, which is a depressant. So they cancel each other out.”
“Come to my place,” he said, and my heart leapt, and then quickly crashed down: “Attalah will get you fed.”
“Sure,” I said, because what was the alternative? Wandering the streets in a panic of hatred? Heading home to be swallowed up again by the sadness of my father’s fallen state? To drown in the sea of words we’d never get to say to each other? So I went, to the home of the first man (the only man) I’d ever loved, to be fed by his wife.
“You moved out of the Towers,” I said, when he steered us away from State Street.
“Yup. Bought our own place.”
“I’m so happy for you guys,” I said, dishonestly. Or rather—I was happy for them, but I was also desperately unhappy.
So maybe I was kind of a little drunk.
“Kids?” I asked, as we walked up to the front door.
“No kids,” he said, ushering us in, and there had to be a story there.
Attalah was seated in a recliner, reading a book. I’d forgotten how impressive she was, how regal. How big, in so many senses of the word.
“Hello, Ronan,” she said, smiling. “Welcome back to our fucked city.”
She got up. It took her a minute.
“I’m sorry I didn’t reply to your text,” I said. “Figured showing up in person would be even better.”
“You figured right,” she said, and hugged me. And I felt so held. So found.
Our eyes locked. I could see it there, somehow. Her hate. Her anger. It mirrored mine. And I smiled, and so did she.
Where had it come from, this anger? This town hated me. My life in Hudson had been miserable. I still carried the scars. The broken-off blade between my ribs.
So why was I so angry? Why did I want to murder them all, these innocent, wide-eyed hipsters who were killing the thing I spent years dreaming of killing? Why save Hudson at all?
I couldn’t answer. I didn’t know. All I knew was: this rage, this hate—it felt a hell of a lot better than the hurt of how I failed my father. Hate was a drug, and if there was one skill I’d spent years cultivating, it was the knack for self-medicating.
“It’s good to be back,” I said. “I think.”
“We don’t get to choose our cages.” She gave me one last squeeze before releasing me, and it felt so good (so maternal) I could feel my throat tighten. “For better or for worse, this is home.”
And, yes. I knew. Even then, even there at the very start, I could see that they were a scapegoat, an oversimplification. That I hated the invaders, blamed them for my father’s decline—because if I didn’t have them, there’d be nowhere for this hate to go but back onto me. I’d have nothing to drive this harpoon blade into but my own barren, fucked-up heart. And that was unacceptable.
* * *
“I WANT THEM GONE,” I said, without planning to. Two hours had passed, drinking beer and eating cookies Attalah had baked. Talking shit about the new Hudson. Two hours of her anger seeping into me, a contact high that did for my rage what crystal did for lust—magnified, multiplied it; mutated it into something dark and disturbing and dangerous. “I want them all to run screaming from this town and never look back.”
“Shhh,” Dom said. He took another cookie.
“No,” I said. “I don’t just want them gone. I want them broken. I want them to hurt like we’ve been hurt. I want them evicted, displaced. I want them to lose everything.”
Dom started to say something, but Attalah silenced him with one raised hand. “So do lots of us, Ronan. But there’s nothing we can do.”
I continued, feeling weirdly like I was watching myself from outside my body. I’d finally found a replacement drug, and I was well into the shoulder of the high by now—the sweet spot where you can feel your whole body and brain blossom. “I want to harrow them down to their very souls. I want them to know that they are hated, and to live the rest of their lives with the shadow of that hatred blocking out the sun on even the brightest days.”
“There’s nothing we can do,” she repeated. Her dreadlocks went halfway down her back. In the time we’d been sitting there I’d fallen maybe a little bit in love with her. Back in high school we’d been buddies, but I’d never had a conversation anywhere near this long with her. She was compelling, dynamic. Enchanting. Sitting there, under her spell, eating her cookies, I could feel the boundaries of the possible begin to shift inside me.
“We’ve tried,” she said. “For years, we’ve been trying. I’ve talked to every lawyer and community organizer and halfway-human politician I could get on the phone or whose office I could talk my way into, and there’s nothing—”
“Nothing legal,” I said. The words hung there. They got bigger the longer the silence went. I had never seen Dom so shocked, not even the first time I kissed him. “You’ve been doing, what? Petitions? Meetings with politicians? Church fundraisers? Nonviolent demonstrations? That won’t work here, will it?”
Attalah’s eyes locked onto mine. I didn’t blink.
Dom laughed, but it failed to break the tension. “You can’t be serious. What are you—”
Attalah raised her hand again, without breaking eye contact. Dom fell silent. “What are you saying, Ronan?”
“I’m saying that I want to destroy them,” I said, and it felt so sweet to say it, like a hit of a drug that peeled back my inhibitions and let me see parts of myself so ugly and beautiful I’d spent a lifetime hiding them from myself. Even sweeter was seeing that it was true. I did want to destroy them. I could do it, too. I could do anything.
Fuck meth. This feeling was magnificent.
“I will break every law of man and God to do it,” I said.
“That’s a bold statement for someone who ran away from here the first chance he got and never looked back,” she said. “Where’s all this town spirit coming from?”
“I failed my father,” I said. “I abandoned him. All the hate and pain I felt here—I connected it with him. I may be too late to correct the damage that I did, but not to atone for it. And for so long, I was so focused on how much I hated this place that I never saw how much I also loved it. I see it now, though, walking Warren Street, seeing what they’ve done to it. I think we can do this, Attalah. You and me.”
“Me,” she said. “Why me?”
“Because you know this place and all these people. Who has power and who has secrets. And people love you and respect you. They’ll listen to you. But mostly—because you’re as angry as I am. Aren’t you?”
She nodded.
“Between the two of us we could probably come up with a pretty solid plan. Couldn’t we?”
She nodded again.
“Fuck,” Dom said, standing up. “Y’all are serious. You are, aren’t you? I can’t be here for this. Whatever the hell you’re doing, I don’t want to know about it.”
“Then go,” Attalah said, scooting her chair closer to me. “And shut the door behind you.”